Our data sources

Wohnify monitors publicly accessible flat listings from cooperatives, municipal administrations and selected marketplaces. We collect data respectfully: at a moderate frequency, with a clearly identifiable user agent and in compliance with the terms of use of each site.

In numbers

• 74 actively monitored sources
• 294 further cooperative pages we check for changes
• 1124 cooperatives in the directory
• 140 of which with a public listings page
• 26 cities covered

Cooperatives with a listings page (140)

These websites publish available flats publicly, the best candidates for direct monitoring.

Full directory (1124)

All cooperatives we have recorded so far, including those that currently publish no listings online. We keep re-checking them.

Other ways we find available flats

Property portal Flatfox. Flatfox provides listings through a public interface. We read it in four passes that each run every 30 minutes: the first looks at a sample from all of Switzerland (at most 400 listings per pass, so only a small part of all listings), the other three search the canton of Zurich, the Basel region and the canton of Lucerne piece by piece. We make at most one request every two seconds. We only show and report flats whose landlord is in our directory of cooperatives and non-profit housing providers or has been approved by us by hand. If the landlord does not fit (for example a property manager) or the monthly rent is above CHF 3'500, we store the listing for review but do not show or report it. Our directory is not free of errors; we keep checking it and remove mistakes.

Newsletters from cooperatives. Some cooperatives advertise available flats only by newsletter or only briefly on their website. For this we have our own address with which we have subscribed to individual newsletters. Incoming mails are read automatically. We only store the date, the sender's domain (not the full address), the subject, recognised key data such as number of rooms and rent, and web addresses contained in the mail. We do not store the text of the mail. We do not open the web addresses automatically, and we never open attachments.

What we do not do. We never log in anywhere with other people's credentials and do not bypass any bot protection. If a site excludes automated access in its robots.txt, we do not take it up as a source.

Do you not want us to read your site? Write to us at hello@wohnify.ch. We will then remove the site from the service immediately.

Why not all portals?

Some large property portals prohibit automated reading in their terms of use. We deliberately do not monitor these sources. That is no disadvantage: cooperatives and municipal flats, which are at the centre of Wohnify, are hardly represented there anyway.

Source missing?

Do you know a cooperative or property manager that we do not monitor yet? Write to us at hello@wohnify.ch ; we check every submission and keep expanding our coverage.